"That should be common sense." If you find yourself saying this, you haven’t hired the wrong people—you’ve failed to lead them.

I was recently catching up with a fellow writer—someone who spends a lot of time in the messy reality of scaling engineering organizations. We ended up debating feedback cultures, and I was lamenting "Ruinous Empathy"—that startup trap where everyone is so nice that no one says the hard things, and the company slowly dies of politeness.

He stopped me. The pendulum has swung too far the other way, he said. Too many founders now use "Radical Candor" as a hall pass to vent their frustrations when things go wrong. They yell. They critique. And they call it "keeping the bar high."

When we dug deeper, we realized: the root cause of this frustration isn't performance. It's projection. It almost always starts with the same sentence: "I shouldn't have to tell them that. That's just common sense."

"Common sense" is the biggest lie in leadership.

In a startup, there is no such thing as common sense. There is only shared context. And as the founder, you are the sole architect of that context.

When you say, "It's common sense that this client email should have gone out today," what you really mean is: "I have 28 prioritization criteria in my head that I have never written down, and I'm angry that you didn't telepathically download them."

That's not radical candor. It’s just venting with a fancy framework around it. And it happens because we misunderstand what accountability actually means.

Most teams think accountability means holding someone accountable after the fact. Naming the mistake. Pointing out the omission. Most teams can't even do that—there isn't enough psychological safety or commitment to each other to speak up in the first place.

But that's only half the picture. Real accountability starts before the task, not after. It lives in the expectation setting—the conversation about what good looks like before anyone gets to work. Very few teams master this part. And it's the part that unlocks everything else.

Because when we rely on unspoken expectations, we set our teams up to fail. We force them to guess. And when they guess wrong, we punish them for a lack of "instinct"—when the real failure was a lack of instruction.

True high performance isn't about hiring people who "just get it." It's about building a system where "getting it" is inevitable because the expectations are explicit.

The next time you feel a spike of frustration because someone didn't do something the "obvious" way, stop. Do not give feedback yet.

Instead, run this 3-step audit:

If the answer is "nowhere" or "I implied it once," you don't have a performance problem. You have a clarity problem.

Your move: Take that specific expectation you just wrote down and turn it into a principle. Share it with the team tomorrow.

Stop relying on common sense. Start building shared context.